Evolution Takes a Leap

Do you remember three-part paper interlibrary loan (ILL) forms? How about high-speed microfilm readers, used for viewing hundreds of spools of microfilm that contained images of catalog cards? If you can recall either one, then you know how much technology has had an impact on resource sharing over the past 30 years. And if you never saw these artifacts, that's okay—there is plenty more technology-powered change ahead.

Thirty years ago most resource sharing took place between libraries, with a few formal organizations (library consortia) providing logistical support. Today there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of organizations around the world facilitating resource sharing. That's the other major change: the ongoing transformation of the organizational structure of resource sharing.

Automation has greatly accelerated the growth of resource sharing. As access to resources improved, and the ability to request materials was streamlined, resource-sharing activity skyrocketed. For example, while reference transactions, circulation, and in-house use among Association of Research Libraries (ARL) members declined significantly between 1991 and 2003, resource sharing increased dramatically. Circulation dropped by seven percent, reference transactions declined by 29 percent, and in-house use of materials went down by 49 percent, but interlibrary borrowing increased by a whopping 113 percent.

OCLC, with thousands of members, has logged 128 million ILL requests since the early 1980s. On a lesser scale, smaller organizations have had a real impact. For example, the Illinois Library Computer Systems Organization (ILCSO), with its 65 libraries, has recorded nearly ten million resource-sharing requests in the same time period. The International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) boasts nearly 200 consortia as members.

Earlier resource-sharing organizations were formed to handle physical resources, but the 1990s saw the broadening of access to e-resources through the development of institutions such as the Virtual Library of Virginia (1994) and Illinois Digital Academic Library (1999). As Tim Bucknall describes in "The Virtual Consortium," p. 16, this trend is not only alive but going through new incarnations.

What will the future look like for resource sharing? The crystal ball reveals a number of issues sure to impact its future, all of which involve technology or the consortia.

Money, or the lack of it, has become a major issue for library organizations over the past several years. Nearly all resource- sharing consortia are supported with public funds, and those groups saw declining revenues as the 21st century got underway. OhioLINK is a good example. Established to provide information resources for the students, faculty, and staff of Ohio colleges and universities, it facilitates the sharing of physical library resources and provides access to centrally subsidized e-resources. It is recognized internationally as a model for delivering information resources to the higher education community.

For years, OhioLINK received considerable resources, peaking in FY01. Since then, reflecting declining state revenues, OhioLINK's funding has shrunk. Member libraries have had to unexpectedly assume part of the costs of some e-content purchases. OhioLINK is reducing the number of e-journals that it supports. The consortium also will be instituting an annual membership fee for the first time in its 15-year history. "The short term prospects look dim," says OhioLINK director Tom Sanville, but he remains upbeat about the long haul. "Our patrons have a strong taste of the increased accessibility we provide, and they do not want to lose it," says Sanville. "We are getting tremendous support from faculty and staff who now have a greater appreciation of what is at stake. We may dangle off the cliff, but in the end there will be compelling reasons for our clientele to create a stronger resource-sharing future."

OhioLINK may well have the strong foundation required to weather tough times, but if budget cuts and retrenchment can strike an organization this successful, the implications for smaller or less established resource-sharing organizations are grave. To survive, it's likely that consortia will need to look at new models or other ways of doing business.

Consortia have proliferated over the past ten years. Let's look at Illinois's academic consortia. The 65-member ILCSO has been in existence for 25 years. The Illinois Cooperative Collection Management Program has provided nearly 20 years of service to the academic library community and has 115 members. The Illinois Digital Academic Library began in 1999; members stand at 150. Each organization receives most of its funding from the state. There is some degree of overlap in services and considerable overlap in membership. Discussions about merging these (and other) consortia have taken place over the years, with little progress.

Declining state revenues have made the discussions about consolidation more urgent, with everyone realizing the need to pool fiscal and staff resources to continue offering current services and to develop new ones. A recent proposal to merge these consortia into a single group could change the landscape of Illinois academic library resource sharing significantly. It's a trend likely to be repeated nationwide.

Earlham College's Peter Suber defines open access (OA) literature as being "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions." The OA movement is too complex to treat here, but it has some important implications for broad-based access to information, which is what resource sharing is all about. (See also "Choosing Sides," in LJ 4/15/05, p. 43.)

Some examples of OA include publishers offering online access to journal articles to nonsubscribers over the web and researchers archiving their papers in institutional repositories. While a number of people tend to restrict the discussion of OA to peer-reviewed scholarly literature, others extend it to resources beyond scholarly journals. Some organizations are experimenting with open access to books. For example, the National Academies Press has more than 3000 of its books available online for free. It has found that offering these books online has resulted in increased interest in the titles without hurting print sales.

Being invisible on the web has its costs, which is placing some competitive pressures on those for-profits that have chosen to keep all their content behind a paywall. This may result in more content becoming freely available. In the March 2005 Wired, Adam Penenberg discussed the increasing market pressures on the Wall Street Journal, which keeps all its online content for subscribers only.

Open access won't disintermediate librarians—people will still need help finding content, and some material will be housed in institutions and repositories. But open access may well impact resource-sharing intermediaries—the consortia.

Google's initiative to digitize some of the collections of some research libraries is bound to have an impact on resource sharing. While the scanning will be selective at some institutions—affecting only materials in the public domain—Google has announced its intentions to scan the entire collections of Stanford and University of Michigan, including copyrighted materials. It's expected that nearly 60 million volumes in all will be scanned over the coming years, and users will be able to search these texts freely via the web.

While it appears that this service will offer only snippets of books, especially copyrighted materials, with restricted copying/printing capabilities, it looks like Google intends to provide the user with links to local libraries holding the book through Google Print's "Find It in a Library" function. This capability is most likely an offshoot of the Google/OCLC effort to enable search engine access to the more than 50 million records represented in OCLC's Open WorldCat.

A number of details have yet to be disclosed, but what is critical is that Google and the participating libraries appear to be forging ahead, not dissuaded by technical or legal obstacles. Whatever the ultimate success of this undertaking, its being in motion may well cause publishers to reconsider their approaches to offering information via the web, upping what they now offer at no cost.

But more book content on the web will likely mean more requests for books that your library may well not own. It won't matter if the ebook is provided in its entirety (who wants to read a book online?) or as a snippet. Books left sleeping on the shelves will suddenly find new life.

The net result will be positive for libraries, with increased visibility for our holdings. But if users can search library resources directly, what impact might this have on resource-sharing organizations? It's too early to tell.

We live in interesting times for resource sharing. Fiscal support has been on the decline. The pressure to consolidate mounts. Some consortia may go out of business, others may reorganize. At the same time, more high-quality resources, especially in the journals area, will be freely and directly accessible to end users. Books, either the content they contain or the metadata attached to them, will soon be accessible in ways never experienced before. The effect of this on resource-sharing entities may be unknown, but, fortunately, library consortia have always been good at evolving to serve users as technology changes. Let's get ready to evolve again.